Jeremy Denk, piano: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1

The esteemed pianist Jeremy Denk—MacArthur Fellow, writer, and noted musical commentator—performs Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the preludes and fugues that Beethoven referred to as his musical bible. Denk has written insightfully about Bach as a great humanist, describing how the composer’s music represents an “intoxicating combination”—a feeling of the divine balanced with the earthly beauty of logic and discipline. The New York Times has extolled Denk’s “profound affinity with Bach” as a performer, and the Philadelphia Inquirer has called his Bach recitals “mesmerizing.”